1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to visually assisted teleconferences, and more specifically to imaging the kind and extent of user inputs to a teleconference.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is an abundance of online conferencing tools. Some tools permit a visual representation of a user to be displayed, for example, a photo, on the client workstations of the user's peers that attend the electronic meeting. Often, the user's icon or persona is exchanged with peers over high-speed packet communications which now support even high-quality voice. Online conferencing, at a minimum, requires visibility among at least two people, the inputs of at least one such attendee to the online conference, wherein those inputs may be audio and video, among others.
Among the chief challenges to online conferences is maintaining the attention and interaction of all conference attendees. Attentive attendees result in faster meetings, better awareness of each person's responsibilities and preferences, and generally better satisfaction that each person can be counted on to follow through.
Unfortunately, access to applications other than the online conferencing client often distracts. Such applications may include electronic mail, web browser, and streaming media to name a few.
Some progress has occurred in recent years. For example, some collaboration tools provide photographs of participants. Other tools offer polling mechanisms. In addition, polling mechanisms generally provide both a user-input form, and a consensus results display. The user-input form may be a combination of a question and a series of options in the form of radio-buttons associated with a descriptive text, wherein a user may select and possibly confirm a choice or preference. The consensus results display may show the number of votes cast for each of the choices presented in the user-input forms.
There are many subtle cues that may be available in a face-to-face meeting or an in-office meeting that are also lost in an online conferencing environment. For example, diplomas and awards that hang in one's office do not have suitable online substitutes shown in connection with online conferencing environments. In addition, a set of attendee attributes, e.g. concerning an attendee's national origin or affiliations with relevant societies and groups is not available in online conferencing environments.
It would be advantageous to, at the outset of each meeting, perhaps as each person logs in, show static details of the attendee's seniority, origin or other unchanging details of a participant.
In addition, it would be helpful to show dynamic aspects of a participant's level of involvement in a meeting, particularly in relation to facial features. Among the aspects of involvement may be whether an attendee has voted on a poll question. Therefor, visibility as to who fails to vote is helpful.